In general, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an information processing method. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an information processing method wherein and whereby optimum control depending on properties of data is executed by embedding a control instruction in the data itself for controlling the order and the priority of transferring the data.
The performance of home entertainment systems and personal computers has been improving due to the increased frequencies of processing LSIs and the increased scales of circuit integration thereof. In order to further enhance the processing performance of the systems, a plurality of processing devices such as a graphics processor and an image thawing processor are integrated into a single LSI for implementing a system which is capable of carrying out processing in parallel. With such a single LSI, however, it is the memory cost that remains to be reduced. Thus, a memory is shared by the processing devices as a way of reducing the memory cost. A configuration in which a memory is shared by the processing devices is referred to as a UMA (Unified Memory Architecture).
In comparison with the increased operating frequencies of processing LSIs and the increased scales of circuit integration thereof, however, the storage capacity of a general memory is not increased so much in comparison with the conventional memory manufactured so far at the same cost, giving rise to a problem that the storage capacity of the memory remains flat, a problem in the performance improvement that remains to be solved.
In addition, also in an architecture wherein a memory is shared by a plurality of processors such as the UMA, there is raised a problem that the speed to make an access to the memory is slowed down, a problem in the performance improvement that remains to be solved.